Rammstein
Völkerball (Special Edition)

THE REVIEW

Released three years after the previous DVD (Lichtspielhaus) and one year after the album 'Rosenrot', the third DVD of the German sextet. The rich product has been distributed in three different versions, each containing material (mainly live) extracted from the 'Reise Reise' tour 2004/2005.

The Special Edition begins with a first DVD (present in all editions), containing Live material from the concert in Nimes (in full version) and clips of concerts held in London, Moscow, and Tokyo.

The concert in Nimes is, in my opinion, one of the best concerts the band has ever held, offering a show that is technically and organizationally perfect, as spectacular as usual in their concerts. After a short wait, the concert begins and the notes of "Reise Reise" start, the curtain covering the stage drops, and the musicians appear. The look is not cybernetic and monolithic like that of the renowned 'Live Aus Berlin', on the contrary, it is varied: the keyboardist Christian "Flake" Lorenz sports a soldier's helmet and sunglasses, the first guitarist, Richard Kruspe, displays a long black coat with bullet trims, the second, instead, has a peculiar outfit made of suspenders and a typical German cap. The drummer and bassist, strictly shirtless (a now customary practice), are quickly shown. After a long repetition of the song's riff, the singer Till Lindemann makes his entrance, appearing elegant and sharp, and the audience goes wild.

Amid the screams of the ecstatic audience, the six musicians perform non-stop the now-classic "Links 2 3 4" and the then-new "Keine Lust", with spectacular smoke machines placed on stage. After an exhilarating "Feuer Frei!", characterized by flamethrowers brought to Till, Richard, and Paul's faces, the group unusually performs the "old" "Asche Zu Asche", from the band's first album, which the audience welcomes by singing at the top of their lungs for the entire duration of the piece. Now it's time for three tracks from "Reise Reise", namely "Morgenstern", "Mein Teil" and "Stein Um Stein", which are performed flawlessly with an ecstatic audience.

The acoustic "Los" is one of the concert's delicacies, as towards the end of the piece the keyboardist Flake shows off all his madness with an improvised keyboard solo over the guitar riff of the song, transformed from acoustic to distorted. After another classic from the band, namely "Du Riechst So Gut", they offer the audience in preview (the album Rosenrot would be released three months later) the single "Benzin", which the audience accepts with unrestrained headbanging. After "Du Hast" and "Sehnsucht", taken from the eponymous album, characterized by beautiful green and white lights, the twelve thousand people present in the arena go wild, with confetti shot at them during the chorus of the renowned single "Amerika".

The concert proceeds swiftly with the martial "Rammstein", the powerful "Sonne" (recently elected by Italian fans as the best song ever produced by the sextet), the classic "Ich Will" and the "new" ballad "Ohne Dich". It concludes with "Stripped", a cover of the famous Depeche Mode song, with a central break, giving time for the bassist to "navigate" the audience with a dinghy. The inserts taken from the live shows in Tokyo, London (complete with neoclassical setting), and Moscow are a bit boring, as almost all the songs presented had already been viewed in the first part of the DVD, namely in the concert in Nimes. Among these, noteworthy are certainly the energetic "Rein Raus", which turns the Brixton Academy into a hellish pit, and "Moskau", performed in Moscow amid the crowd's frenzy.

The CD (contained in all versions), almost entirely includes the concert, and does nothing but confirm what I've said, and affirm that the group has improved technically: who would have ever guessed that the riff of "Links 2 3 4" and the chorus in the refrain of "Feuer Frei!" could be respectively accompanied and covered by a double bass drum gallop? Then noteworthy is Richard Kruspe's fine solo work in "Links 2 3 4", "Stein Um Stein", "Los", "Du Riechst So Gut" and "Rammstein" and Flake's usual excellent performance on keyboards.

The second DVD, present only in the limited edition and the special one, is instead divided into two documentaries, one named "Anakonda Im Netz", containing interviews with all the band members and concert clips, and the other the Making Of the album 'Reise Reise', (and also 'Rosenrot', therefore, as most of the songs from the latter were taken from the discarded sessions of the former) in which one can see the group's life during the recording of an album and snippets of the actual sessions.

"More is not possible, we show everything that can be packed into a DVD", words of manager Emanuel Fialik, and, as a supporter of the band, I can consider myself more than satisfied.